Placer plans future: Let's get dense

Put 200 people in a room and you're more likely to get 400 points of view than a handful, but that was the amazing result of the workshop held last weekend in Roseville to determine just how south Placer County should grow.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, Placer County, with 240,000 people now, is home to some of the fastest-growing cities in California and is projected to gain as many as 420,000 people in the next 45 years. At the same time, the county is struggling to preserve much of its natural resources, one of several quality-of-life reasons why many people are moving there in the first place.

Thus, there was some amount of urgency and anticipation at the workshop, part of the Blueprint Transportation-Land Use Study co-sponsored by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments and Valley Vision. Participants on this Saturday morning filled 20 tables for 10 people each from a diverse crowd representing an impressive mix of public and private sectors, with concerned citizens, businesspeople, environmentalists, builders and government planners working side by side.

In fact, most of those participating appeared to be representing not only their trade, but themselves as residents of Placer County.

The task, as presented to us, was to figure out which of four ways the county should grow through 2050:

Scenario A, which continues our present course as guided by general plans currently in place. This scenario plans for more jobs than housing growth, which is predominantly low-density residential.

Scenario B, which projects the same total growth as A, but would build more mixed-use centers and corridors and higher-density housing.

Scenario C, which lowers the growth rate with a balance of jobs and housing. It features similar growth in mixed-use centers/corridors and housing as B, and includes higher residential densities.

Scenario D, which sets a higher growth rate with a balance of jobs and housing. It projects similar growth in mixed-use centers/corridors and housing stock as B and C.

The three alternatives to Scenario A somewhat stack the deck against the course we're on now -- sprawl, traffic jams and great losses in agricultural land and open space. So, it's logical that since no table in the workshop chose to continue in the current direction, all participants found that the only way to avoid that scenario was to go for higher-density growth.

Now, here comes the amazing part. The similarity in thinking didn't stop at scenarios. It reached very specific outcomes:

The planned connector route between highways 65 and 99 was considered by most tables to be a given, with slight variations in the route.

?Many considered the Placer Parkway -- viewed by some environmentalists as a gateway to sprawl -- to be the future edge of growth, the line in the dirt that marks the edge of the urban services boundary, meaning that no growth would be allowed to the north of the expressway.

;As a result, some tables moved the locations of the proposed campuses planned by California State University Sacramento and De La Salle University (a private college), even though those sites would be given to the county by the landowners, presumably in exchange for the right to develop land around them. Those sites, as they exist now, were considered by many on Saturday to be huge traffic inducers.

Land around the university sites should be mixed-use housing, retail and work centers of high- to medium-density, linked by light rail to shopping districts such as the Galleria at Roseville mall, downtown Sacramento and the airport.

Some tables wiped out growth in such beautiful sites as Bickford Ranch (east of Lincoln) and Clover Valley Lakes (northeast Rocklin), and instead focused on rebuilding the core of Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln. That means dense, mixed-use housing, retail and work centers.

It became obvious upon looking at the map that growth toward Sacramento International Airport was inevitable, with both Sacramento and Sutter County already creeping that way. As a result, it was equally obvious to many that forcing Placer's growth southwestward, rather than north of Lincoln and east of Rocklin, would be more desirable, to protect the foothills from being run over by low-density single-family housing.

The challenge is getting people to buy into this higher-density thinking, making those places attractive to younger families by including good schools, parks, safe streets and affordable housing -- in other words, by providing many of the same qualities that families seek in the suburbs. The lure of shorter commutes will help, but until those needs are met, this new way of thinking will be an extremely tough sell.

And, of course, until elected officials stop approving growth in the hinterlands, where land is more affordable for homebuilders, the sprawl will continue.

As Roseville Mayor Rocky Rockholm said Saturday, it's not a situation in which "if we build it, they will come. They're coming whether we build it or not."